The New Wave ~ Kill Boring Dead
The New Wave is Campaign Brief’s Q&A series spotlighting the next generation of independent creative companies and exploring how the indie model is evolving. From structure and speed to culture and capability, we unpack where these businesses are finding their edge and what’s driving client decisions today. Next up is Marcus Willis, Founder and CEO, Kill Boring Dead.
1. Give us the elevator pitch, who are you and what do you do?
We’re Kill Boring Dead. We’re an Australian creative and social-first agency built on one belief: safe marketing is a death wish – to your campaigns, your commercials, and your career.
Most agencies sell you services. We sell you the best work of your career.
We are passionate about ideas that move through culture, start on social, and ladder up into brand and big campaigns.
We won a Webby for a super glue brand in the WEIRD category this year. That should tell you everything.
2. Are indies still challengers, or have they become the norm?
The word “indie” has gone soft. There are plenty of independent agencies doing beige work with a football table in the corner. Independent isn’t a personality.
The challenger part isn’t about indie vs holdco (though I know what team I’d rather partner with). It’s about whether you’re willing to be brave, interesting and build real fame. Whether you’ll hand a client an idea that scares them a little. Most won’t – indie or not.
So no, the challenger hasn’t become the norm. Boring became the norm. We’re the ones still fighting it.
3. What’s your unfair advantage over the networks today?
Speed and spine.
A network needs seventeen signoffs to approve a caption. By the time their idea clears legal, the culture it was chasing is dead. We can go from a thought in Fitzroy Gardens to live on a feed while they’re still booking the kick-off call.
But the real advantage is that our strategy and creative sit in the same room. Not strategy in one tower, creative in another, media guessing in a third. One team, one idea, one through line – insight straight into execution with nothing lost in the handover. That’s how you get work that’s brave AND commercial, instead of brave OR safe.
Networks optimise for not getting fired. We optimise for fame. Very different sport.
4. How are you using AI to compete above your weight?
AI is the best admin assistant we’ve ever hired. And the worst creative in our team for work that connects with culture.
We use it where it’s genuinely lethal – research, mining community management for what audiences actually think, spotting patterns across social no human junior could ever catch. A week of desk research becomes an afternoon. So, our people spend their hours on the only thing that matters: a really good, unique idea.
What we don’t do is let the robot make the work. Because customers are REALLY resisting AI on their feeds. And the industry’s got confused – people liking AI for helping them be more efficient is not the same as liking AI to sell them an unrealistic dream, product, world or story.
That’s our whole job, damn it. And it always will be.
5. What kind of clients are choosing indies right now, and why?
The ones who’ve run the numbers and realised safe and boring is actually the expensive option.
You can’t rescue a dead organic post by throwing $80k of media at it. Smart marketers know that now. So, the clients coming to us aren’t chasing “edgy” for its own sake – they’re the ones who understand that emotion is what makes work memorable, and safe work which ticks 99% of your brand guidelines is actually money set on fire.
They tend to be brave brand managers sick of playing an era that’s already over. Four brand films a year, long approval cycles – that world’s gone. Some of these brands need a thousand pieces of content a year now, and they need a partner built for that reality, not one still nostalgic for the last one.
6. What’s next, growth, staying lean, or something else?
Fame. Growth is what happens on the way there.
But to support this, we’ve recently brought in more ‘suits’ to sharpen the machine as we take on bigger, more complex accounts – structure that makes the work braver, not blander. Our team has been scrappy, and fast, and bold, and working outside the norms, but we also needed some more Type-A “normies” to embed more structure for our larger corporate beasts. I think we’re about to nail the new structure at KBD, and it’s exciting.
And we’ve got a run of work about to drop that I’m almost too excited about: a full-blown pickle war playing out on the internet, a smelly-breath campaign that has no business being as good as it is, and a wellness lounge for dogs, because obviously.
The three-year plan hasn’t changed. Global presence, and one day, a Super Bowl spot with our name on it. Until then we just keep aiming for fame while everyone else aims for the middle. Aim for the middle, you get the middle.
Check out the other New Wave Q&As below:
Read Oblong Creative’s Q&A here
Read The Many Australia’s Q&A here
Read Bureau of Everything’s Q&A here
Read Art of the Possible ANZ’s Q&A here
Register for FREE HERE and receive the Campaign Brief Daily Bulletin and/or the global Best Ads Best of the Week Bulletin. Subscribe to Campaign Brief Magazine.
#More Creative News #No paywalls #No annual membership fees
Subscribe to Portfolio & Reel for current listings of Australian and NZ ad agency and production company leadership and key personnel